


The Dead and Damned

by sparxwrites



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dream Sex, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Nightmares, Past Sexual Assault, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-19 21:47:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8225792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: In the first four nights after his death, Percy dreams the dreams of the dead.He dreams of Orthax, first and foremost. Of being back in the demon’s small pocket of hell, of being back in its talons, of its beak dipping into the ephemeral substance of his soul and shredding it slowly, meticulously, hungrily. Other dreams come in bits and pieces, snippets. The barrier over Whitestone falls. Kynan’s daggers sink into Keyleth’s back and she twitches and then falls still, and never moves again.Most vividly of all, though, he dreams of Ripley.





	

In the first four nights after his death, Percy dreams the dreams of the dead.

Or, perhaps, more accurately the dreams of the _damned_ – he’s not entirely sure there’s a difference, at least as far as he’s concerned. The dreams are dark and bloody, full of smoke and gore and horror, more so than his usual nightmares.

He dreams of Orthax, first and foremost. Of being back in the demon’s small pocket of hell, of being back in its talons, of its beak dipping into the ephemeral substance of his soul and shredding it slowly, meticulously, hungrily. With those ones, it’s hard to tell if he’s dreaming – if this is the dream, and his waking hours a reality, or whether the time spent back alive with his friends is some strange new horror conjured up to torment him.

Other dreams come in bits and pieces, snippets, fractured flashes. The barrier over Whitestone falls, and his sister dies, immolated in Thordak’s fire. Vox Machina find his letter and don’t bother to bring him back, leave his body in a ditch for the crows and foxes and creeping earthworms. Kynan’s daggers sink into Keyleth’s back and she twitches and then falls still, and never moves again. The hair haloed around her head is the same colour as the blood that pools under her, thick and seeping.

(Vox Machina, his sister, Kima and Allura, Gilmore… they all die, them and himself and everyone he’s ever cared about, over and over, in a thousand awful ways, until the sight of their corpses brings no grief. Only numbness.)

Most vividly of all, though, he dreams of Ripley.

She’s something strange, in the depths his mind sinks to when he falls asleep. Somehow both blurry and in oversaturated focus, hazy and sharp at the same time – her hands, her eyes, her mouth, in glorious technicolour and high definition, everything gone soft, like an oil painting left out in the rain.

Every inch of his skin crawls, goosebumps and pinpricks and _wrongness_ , and he reaches out to her – to her throat, to wrap hands around it. She’s dead, he knows she’s dead, a corpse riddled with holes and rotting alone on an island of glass. But she lives on _here_ , inside of him, in the dark spaces of his mind, and he needs to get her _out_. Needs to get her out, needs her gone, needs her-

His hands don’t find her throat, but her shoulders.

The sensation of being a spectator to his own self isn’t a new one, for Percy. He’s been possessed, had his mind made soft and malleable with magic, spent close to _years_ missing days and weeks at a time to dissociation and fugue. He knows what it feels like to not be in control of his own body, is intimately familiar with the slow, creeping numbness of it.

That doesn’t mean he has to like it, though. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel sick, sick to his stomach with writhing horror as his dream self runs hands over Ripley’s upper arms, her sides. Cups a palm under the modest swell of one breast. Presses his lips to the curve of her neck in a silent kiss, mouth sliding open to suck a reddened mark over the place where her pulse thrums closest to the surface.

She’s soft beneath his hands, still and yielding, and he wants to _scream_. This is _sick_ , a sick joke his mind’s playing on him in collusion with a woman who is _dead_ , who can never hurt- _should_ never _be able_ to hurt him- him again.

But his throat won’t work, and he can’t seem to wake himself from the nightmare, and he can’t seem to look away from his own shaking, unsteady hands as they strip Anna’s clothes away to reveal her naked chest, stomach, thighs…

He pushes her down onto the bed – and he’s not sure when the bed appeared, because the dream is warping around him, twisting to fit reality to its own horrific narrative – and straddles her hips.

The motion is easy, as familiar as breathing, and he’s not sure why. Last time, it wasn’t like this. Last time, she was the one straddling _him_ , legs splayed around narrow hips and knees braced in the slippery blood coating the table she’d laid him out on, bright-eyed and excited as he’d cried and cried and _cried_ \- from the relief of it, from the fact that the pain had finally, _finally_ stopped- from the _sickness_ that had wrenched in his stomach as she’d sunk down with a shuddering gasp, the hot bile in his throat bitter against the back of his tongue-

He feels the panic rising, a drumbeat of horror in his head, but his body doesn’t. His body carries on, moves without his permission, goes through the motions of tenderness with this dream-creation wearing his torturer’s face, even as he, Percival, _screams_.

“Good boy,” Anna croons, reaching a hand up to press a palm to his cheek. He can feel her skin against his, rough callouses and shiny powder-burns, the faintest scratch of nails against his stubble as he leans into the touch. She used to call him that, he remembers – when he’d screamed loud enough to satisfy her, when he’d begged for the pain to stop, when he’d been reduced to heaving, panicky sobs because he was barely more than a boy and he knew nothing and he couldn’t help her, and gods, _Pelor_ , _please_ -

His dream-self shudders, though, not with revulsion, but with _pleasure_.

 _No_ , he thinks, _no, no, no_ , but he leans down against her all the same, pressed chest to warm chest in the silence of the dream space. He can feel her breathing, the rise and fall of her chest beneath his, the soft press of her breasts against skin marked with a myriad of scars put there by her own hand.

Worse, he can feel how her breathing quickens when he slips a hand between her legs. When he shifts against her. When he rocks his hips into position.

 _No_ , he prays, begs, _pleads,_ as he pushes inside her and she groans, hot and wet and welcoming around him. _No-_

He doesn’t know how long they stay there, locked together, moving together, in the dark and quiet of his dream. It would be almost meditational, he thinks, if it weren’t for the horror of it, if he weren’t numb and nerveless and trapped inside a body that refuses to listen to him. His mind’s stuck in a feedback loop of _please_ and _no_ , unable to wake up, unable to wrest control back. Unable to do anything other than watch, in the dark and the quiet, as he makes gentle love to the woman who turned him into the broken, ruined thing he is.

“My perfect Percival,” murmurs Anna, eventually, breaking the silence. She shudders beneath him as he rocks into her, spreads her legs a little wider and arches up to meet every languid thrust. “The best of my creations. The brightest of my children. _Perfect_.”

He wants to choke the life out of her, to claw the skin from her bones, to rip her head from her shoulders – but his hands reach out and cup her face, instead. Her lips are warm against his, dry and soft and hungry as they slip open to deepen the kiss.

She comes with her tongue in his mouth, with his hips rocking slowly into her and one hand curled around her hip. He can feel the bone of it, pressed close under the thin skin and meat covering it. Can feel the way she clenches around him, arches up to press against him, gasping quiet, controlled pleasure.

The inside of his mouth, his throat, her tongue, all taste of cold, rotting blood and _death_ , and-

Percy wakes, abruptly, drenched in a cold sweat and with a sob strangled somewhere deep in his throat. It’s dark, and it’s quiet – but this is his room, he reminds himself, as he sits up and struggles to slow his breathing, wiping the cold tear tracks from his flushed cheeks. This is _his room_ , in his home, with his friends just down the corridor. This is his room.

“Ripley is- dead,” he says, into the silence, sucking in a deep, hitching breath, as if the words will make a difference. He grabs at his blankets, drags the softness of them up to drape over his shoulders and weigh him down, ground him. “Ripley is dead, and she’s gone, and she can’t hurt you any more. She’ll never touch you again.”

The declaration sounds hollow, even to his own ears. Ripley may be dead, but he still feels her hands on him. Her nails drag lines down his thighs, her fingers slip between his ribs, and her thighs bracket his hips as she- she- He forces the thought away with a quiet sob, digging nails into the meat of his palm in a vain attempt to dispel the ghosts of Ripley’s touch.

As he sits there in the dark, curled in his blankets and unable to stop shaking, he has strangest sensation of having lost a game he never agreed to play.

**Author's Note:**

> i really like percy and nightmares, so… here, have some thoughts about how an indefinite period of torture and getting your soul chewed on followed by abrupt resurrection might fuck with your dreams in unpleasant ways, and about how _creative_ ripley might have gotten when she had percy in her clutches for percy to be so damn scared of her.
> 
> come find me @sparxwrites on tumblr if you want.


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